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SUMMARY This book is a collection of papers illustrating what the editors ''immodestly call the Amsterdam style,'' which aims at accounting for semantic issues in a totally explicit fashion, using more or less simple extensions of first-order predicate logic. As the title indicates, such classical papers as Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991) or Veltman (1996) are taken as starting points. Here the issue concerns questions and related subjects like topic and focus or exhaustivity.

Paul Dekker, Maria Aloni and Alastair Butler's ''The Semantics and Pragmatics of Questions'' is a general introduction without much formal apparatus to the recurrent topics of the book. Their main goal is to explain the logic of questions of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1997), upon which all contributions are based. Questions create partitions on the context, i.e. possible worlds are grouped together in blocks that are different answers to the question under discussion. The differences between worlds in the same partition are immaterial when it comes to answering. For instance, if knowing who is in Amsterdam is at stake, and admitting that there are only two individuals John and Mary, then there are four partitions: one containing the worlds where nobody is in Amsterdam, one where both are, one where only John is and one where only Mary is. In the latter partition, for instance, the difference between worlds where Mary loves John and worlds where she doesn't is not relevant to the question. Note that two questions may be equivalent in a context, even if they aren't with respect to all possible worlds, if the context is such that their difference concerns only worlds that have been eliminated. For instance, if we assume that John and Mary would visit Amsterdam only if the sun shines, then the question ''Does the sun shine?'' and ''Who is in Amsterdam?'' are equivalent. But we could also be mistaken concerning the conditions of John and Mary's trip, and the actual world could be outside the domain of this equivalence: this is the pragmatics of questions, which are interpreted against some background information.

Part I: ''Update Semantics'' Jeroen Groenendijk's ''The Logic of Interrogation'' (originally published as Groenendijk, 1999) designs a ''game of interrogation'', with one interrogator asking questions and a witness answering them. The language of this game is first order predicate logic, where questions behave as previously described. More formally, updating a context with a question yields all the pairs of worlds (belonging to the context) such that they have the same answer to the question. Thus, questions do not eliminate worlds as assertions do. Then, Groenendijk reinterprets Grice's Maxim of Quality as consistency: the witness should not contradict herself, that is she should not make an assertion leading to the absurd state. Moreover, following the Maxim of Quantity, she should not make redundant contributions (and this goes for the interrogator too), i.e. assertions already entailed by the context. Finally the Maxim of Relation is reinterpreted as: if an assertion P eliminates some world v, and v belongs to the pair , then P should also eliminate w. That is, assertion should not eliminate worlds at random but instead entire partitions, thus resolving issues at hand. Thus, if ''Alf rescued Bea and no one else'' is uttered after the question ''Whom did Alf rescue?'', then ''and no one else'' means that Alf rescued only Bea, and not that nobody besides Alf rescued Bea. For if the latter proposition was meant, then it would answer the question ''Who rescued Bea?''. But this question has not been raised, and there is no corresponding partition on the context; answering it, then, would eliminate worlds belonging to different partitions, and this would not be relevant.

In the third chapter, Balder ten Cate and Chung-chieh Shan provide an axiomatization for the Logic of Interrogation. They also show that when questions are not taken into account, this logic boils down to classical first-order logic. Finally, they try out an alternative to this logic by adding varying domains to it: each possible world has its own domain. Although this extension is not welcome in the linguistic theory, ramifications in mathematics, computer theory and philosophy are discussed.

Paul Dekker's ''Optimal Inquisitive Discourse'' relaxes constraints on the game of interrogation. Questions are defined in a similar way to Groenendijk's paper, but usual interlocutors replace the interrogator and the witness and Grice's maxims are modified accordingly. Relevance is interpreted as the fact that the questions of the interlocutors must be answered as the discourse proceeds (assuming that interlocutors spell out their questions), while Quality obtains when the discourse is supported by the interlocutors' (inner) states. Finally, Dekker discusses the ''mention some'' problem about exhaustivity: some questions obviously do not ask for an exhaustive answer, as in ''How can I get to the station?''. In that case, one can assume that the hearer understands that the question does not reflect the speaker's ''decision problem'', but is an easier formulation of it (the hard formulation being something like a series of questions of the kind ''Will I reach the station if I take this road?'', taking into account that these roads are probably infinitely many).

Part II: ''Topic and Focus'' This section starts with Gerhard Jäger's ''Only Updates. On the Dynamics of the Focus Particle 'Only''' (originally published as Jäger, 1996). It is a refinement of Groenendijk's logic to handle the contextual restriction on the meaning of 'only', while sticking to compositionality (unlike Rooth, 1992). Assertions yield proper updates only if they eliminate entire partitions, i.e. if they address an issue previously raised by an interrogative. Thus ''Only Socrates is wise'' will not mean the same thing, depending on whether ''Who is wise?'' or ''Which Athenians are wise?'' has been asked. In the latter case, one cannot conclude that Zeus in unwise, since only Athenians' wisdom is at stake, thus accounting for the contextual properties of 'only'.

In ''The Dynamics of Topic and Focus'', Maria Aloni, David Beaver, Brady Clark and Robert van Rooij define a context as a pair consisting of an usual information state and an environment, which is a sequence of information states representing what is under discussion (i.e. topics). Instead of partitioning the current state, questions are stacked in the environment under the form of their true answers. Moreover, focus constituents presuppose that the corresponding question is present in the environment. Refining Groenendijk's notion of entailment thanks to the notion of support, the authors propose the notion of congruence, according to which a sentence is congruent if its presupposition are met, thus accounting for the troubles that appear when the wrong constituent is focused.

Paul Dekker's ''Nobody (Anything) Else'' introduces a semantics where the satisfaction relation takes into account sequences of individuals, which work as witnesses for anaphoric relations and existential quantification. The denotation of questions (also considered as topics) is the set of those sequences that yield true answers. On this basis, a restricted quantification is defined such that an existential formula is true relative to some sequence of individuals. Finally, the interpretation of ''else'' targets an individual different from all the individuals previously mentioned, thanks to restricted quantification, explaining how expressions like ''John and somebody else'' work when used to answer a question.

Part III: ''Implicatures and Exhaustiveness'' In ''Exhaustivity, Questions and Plurals in Update Semantics'' (a revised version of Zeevat, 1994), Henk Zeevat defines an operator q such that q(P) yields the exhaustive interpretation of P. This operator is applied to form questions, which thus denote their exhaustive answer, but which are also updated in a special way: they create an alternative information state updated as usual with the denotation of the question. If the answer is positive, this state becomes the current one, otherwise it is negated with respect to the main state. In case of a wh-question, the answer is interpreted as exhaustive (and the information state is updated accordingly). Finally, focus is interpreted as presupposing the related question, thus accounting for exhaustivity effect with focus.

In '''Only': Meaning and Implicatures'', Robert van Rooij and Katrin Schulz criticize what they call the ''focus alternative approach'' (e.g. Rooth, 1992), according to which ''Only John came'' means that there's no individual such that he also came. This approach leads to the exclusion of sentences that may in fact be true. Instead, the authors propose a ''background alternative approach'' such that the same sentence means that the set denoted by the predicate is the smallest one including John. They also consider that the fact that John came is not presupposed but only implicated (since it can be cancelled, as in ''Only John came, if even he did'') because the speaker does not say less than he knows (following the Maxim of Quantity) and is maximally competent (an adaptation of the Maxim of Quality).

In a similar vein, Benjamin Spector's ''Scalar Implicatures: Exhaustivity and Gricean Reasoning'' proposes that exhaustivity and implicatures be derived from the assumption that the speaker makes only optimal answers, i.e. answers that are not entailed by any other answers with the same truth conditions and belonging to the same alternative set. However, contrary to the classical approach, this set is built as the set of all positive answers to the question under discussion, and it is shown that, for instance, although an answer like ''(A or B) or C'' is entailed by ''(A and B) or C'' and thus should exclude it and hence exclude C, this does not happen since, in the relevant alternative set (containing no negation), there is no other answer available with a possible exclusive reading for ''or''. Moreover, the author shows that only positive answers are exhaustified because negative ones are not compared to all their alternatives.

Part IV: ''Intonation and Syntax'' The last part of the book begins with ''Nuclear Accent, Focus, and Bidirectional OT'' by Maria Aloni, Alastair Butler and Darrin Hindsill. The authors aim at accounting for the relative distribution of nuclear accent and focus (in its semantic sense) and propose the ranking of three classical constraints, namely the ''Nuclear Stress Rule'' according to which the most embedded constituent bears the accent, ''Destress'', which causes predictable words to be unstressed, and the ''Focus Set Rule'' which states that the focus should target a constituent containing the nuclear accent. Classical Optimality Theory does not suffice, however, since one must take into account both the speaker and the hearer to resolve possible ambiguities, hence the bidirectional stance. Quite interestingly, the ''Nuclear Stress Rule'', which is a syntactic constraint and thus generally taken to be exceptionless, happens to be the most violable one.

In ''Counting (on) Usage Information: WH-Questions at the Syntax-Semantics Interface'', Alastair Butler shifts the account of so-called intervention effects in interrogatives from syntax to semantics. Taking over Dekker's ideas, the author shows that wh-questions semantically imply wh-binders and matching usage information. The latter should not be embedded under negation, with the extra assumption that the least oblique wh-argument may bear as much information as necessary, thus accounting for the difference between ''Which person did not read which book?'' and ''*Which book didn't which person read'' (where the subject is embedded under the negation), as well as other data from French, Korean, German and Chinese.

Finally, Marie Safárová's ''Nuclear Rises in Update Semantics'' analyzes final rise as the epistemic diamond (the symbol for ''it is possible that'' in intensional logic), such that any sentence P with a final rise is interpreted as ''it is possible that P''. This combines with a question operator with the same semantics as in Groenendijk's paper. Thus it is explained that rising declaratives often behave like interrogatives because if the speaker utters ''it is possible that P'', then her interlocutor is likely to reply ''P'' or ''not P'' if she knows about it. Lack of commitment and other so-called affective meanings are similarly accounted for. However, with an adequate formalization of Grice's maxims, the author also explains why such rising declaratives may be understood as simple ones.

EVALUATION This book is definitely not a handbook where each chapter would address a well-delimited issue. Rather, these are working papers with overlapping subjects and alternative solutions. Thus the reader might feel at the end of each contribution that there's far more to the issue than what is addressed. But the reader might also figure out that the next chapter deals with some remaining problems. No definitive solution stems from the whole book, but one nonetheless ends with a nice picture of the ''Amsterdam style'', and with an interesting view on the problems at hand too.

The title might be misleading. Indeed, barring Groenendijk's opening paper, whose reprint is welcome, most contributions take the semantics of questions as a background to address related subjects, like topic, focus or exhaustivity. This is quite an interesting move that shows how one issue leads to other ones; accounting for their relatedness is more far-reaching than simply sticking to questions over and over, all the more as those related issues often shed some new light on the original problem. For instance, the pervasiveness of Grice's Maxims leads to several tentative formalizations, thus avoiding any artificial separation between some core semantics and a peripheral pragmatics. What does it mean for a speaker to be relevant, for instance, is a problem that should not be explained away by (and confused with) a mere stipulative statement like ''the speaker should be relevant.'' And indeed it is of higher importance when it comes to questions, since for instance it must enable one to distinguish between a wrong answer and an irrelevant one. More generally, trying to guess what the speaker should think or do is not welcome from a linguistic point of view, and one of the merits of formal semantics as illustrated by this book is to avoid such psychological assertions in favor of a strict linguistic model.

As the editors put it in their preface, the Amsterdam style is both formal and fully explicit. This means that the reader won't be spared any technical detail, and at the same time will be able to check each and every step of the development. Needless to say, anyone uncomfortable with logic or unwilling to struggle with a definition should avoid this book. Those interested in linguistic insights more than in machinery at work should also step back. But there is no need to be particularly fond of mathematical formalization to find some interest in this book; although there won't be any new data to chew on, the interest lies in the connections the authors are able to draw between various subjects. For instance, it is striking how investigating questions and exhaustivity offers new insights on the issue of discourse coherence (although hardly mentioned as such). One should not forget that the matter here is dynamic semantics, not simply formal semantics. This means that online speech is at the heart of it (not just representing content) and that such complex objects as discourse or dialogue are investigated more deeply than might seem at first sight. Anyone interested in those topics should have a look at this book, if not give it a thorough reading.

Zeevat, Henk. 1994. ''Questions and Exhaustivity in Update Semantics''. In H. Bunt, R. Muskens and G. Rentier, eds., _Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics_. University of Tilburg.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER Paul Isambert is a PhD student at the University of Paris 3, France. He's currently working on grammaticalization and discourse structure, especially concerning topic shifts and anaphora.

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